The Switch

5

Tanner Roast occupied a large warehouse space on a side street in Brighton, Massachusetts, a working-class suburb of Boston. On one end were the loading bays and on the other a door marked only TANNER. As you entered, you smelled the coffee roasting.

Roasting coffee smells nothing like a coffeehouse. The air in a roastery could smell like wet straw. It was an organic, often not a pleasant smell. Tanner loved it.

But a single bad bean can spoil a whole lot, and you wouldn’t know until you started cupping. Which was what they were doing this morning, Tanner and his crew, which included his roaster, Sal Persico. Sal, a tatted giant of a man, was daintily removing small glass tumblers from a dishwasher. He had multiple piercings and full-sleeve tattoos and hands as big and ungainly-looking as baseball gloves but which were in fact precision instruments. He was an ex-con and looked like it.

When he’d first applied for work, he handed the employment application to Tanner with a kind of hangdog look. Tanner quickly discovered why: Sal had checked the box — the one you tick if you have a criminal record. Tanner asked Sal about the incident that had gotten him imprisoned for three years. Sal told him about the armed robbery he was dragged into as a teenager and sounded not just contrite but embarrassed at his own stupidity. “Well, you’ll find our coffee is better than the swill they serve at Cedar Junction,” Tanner had said. He told Sal he didn’t care about the felony as long he was as good at roasting as Tanner had heard.

They never again talked about the armed robbery. Sal was deeply grateful to Tanner. But Tanner wasn’t being magnanimous. He really didn’t give a damn about Sal’s conviction history. Tanner trusted his ability to size people up, and Sal was a good person. He also turned out to be the Mozart of coffee roasters, a true genius at it.

“Just six today,” he told Tanner, placing the cups in a line next to the Mahlkönig EK 43 grinder. “All Guatemalans.”

“I need to check something,” he told Sal. “Ready in ten?” Sal nodded.

His office, off the adjoining room, was decorated with a cheaply framed poster of red coffee berries growing and a map of the world with pinholes all over it. On another wall was an antique café mirror advertising Maxwell House coffee, which he used sometimes for shaving and sometimes just to sneak a glimpse at whoever was sitting in the visitor chair. He was a sales guy; he always studied his customers closely.

He’d been a top salesman at EMC, a big data-storage company in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, before he and Sarah had taken the plunge and invested their entire nest egg in a start-up venture called Tanner Roast. He loved coffee, loved the people he worked with, and counted himself lucky to be in a business he found so cool.

Atop a pile of papers on his desk sat the laptop, the wrong laptop, the laptop belonging to S. Robbins. It was nagging at him. He wanted to root around in the files, find the full name, an address, maybe a phone number. Give the man, or woman, a call and arrange a swap.

Tanner opened the MacBook Air. He heard a throat being cleared. He looked up and saw his sales director, Karen Wynant, a petite, worried-looking dark-haired woman in her late thirties. She had her contacts out, since she wasn’t on a sales call, and wore her oversized unfashionable red-plastic-framed glasses.

“Michael, you have a minute?”

“Uh, what’s up?” He closed the laptop.

Karen was a worrier of the first rank and tended to borrow trouble, to worry about things there was no point in worrying about. She could be exasperating, but Tanner found it reassuring, almost moving, how seriously she took the business, how committed she was. This wasn’t just a job to her.

“How’d it go in LA?”

“Like I said, he wants to talk to his partners.”

“I thought we agreed on the price.”

“Yeah, well.”

“He wants to negotiate some more?”

“He knows we want the sale. Battaglia Restaurant Group looks good on our website. He didn’t have to say it.”

His intercom buzzed, but he ignored it.

“Which one did he go for?”

“The Kenyan.”

“Really? I’m surprised.”

“Why? It’s the best one we’ve got. Guy’s obviously got a sophisticated palate.”

“A little acidic, no?”

“Maybe it’s not for breakfast, but it’s fine for after dinner, and it’s different. It’s bright.”

“He said he likes dark roasts — that’s why I sent him the French roast Colombian.”

“Maybe he’d never had a light roast before.”

“Alessandro Battaglia?”

“Who knows.”

“Should I follow up, or should you?” His intercom buzzed again.

“Me first; then he’ll hand me off to his beverages guy and you take over. I told you all this in my e-mail. Everything okay?”

She cleared her throat again. She seemed to be working up to something. “I haven’t seen a contract from the Four Seasons, have you?”

“It’ll come. Don’t sweat it.” He tried not to sound annoyed. She asked daily. If anyone should be nervous about the Four Seasons deal, it was Tanner himself. He and Karen had flown to the Toronto headquarters of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts three times, pitching a deal to provide all the coffee to a half dozen of the Four Seasons hotels in North America. They made it through round after round, until it was just Tanner Roast left.

What had done the trick was Tanner Cold Brew. The Four Seasons people agreed it was the best-tasting concentrate around. They complimented him on having the ingenuity to add cold brew to the tastings. None of their rivals had offered that.

So Tanner Roast won the bake-off. It was a handshake deal, the contracts being drawn up over the next few weeks, but it was a deal nonetheless. What no one apart from Tanner and his CFO knew was that this would save Tanner Roast from going under. The finances were that tight.

He stood up to encourage Karen to leave, and when he turned he saw Lucy Turton, the office manager, standing in the office doorway. Lucy was tall and outdoorsy, with short blond hair and a permanent healthy flush in her cheeks.

“A minute?” she said. Karen excused herself and left.

“Sure.”

Lucy came in, closed the door, and perched on the edge of the visitor chair. “It’s about Connie again.”

Tanner rolled his eyes. She was talking about an office employee, the bookkeeper, Connie Hunt. Connie was out of the office a lot. She always conjured up one reason or another why she had to miss work. Last year, she was suddenly gone for a week, and when she returned, Lucy had asked her if everything was okay. Connie had replied that her dog had had puppies — so that, really, it was like maternity leave. For several years, Lucy had been begging Tanner to fire Connie. But he always insisted on giving the woman another chance. “Now what?”

“All right, so last month she was gone for almost a week because of carpal tunnel in her right arm. But when she came back she said it was in her left wrist. She was out last week because of a death in her family. Her aunt, she said. But today she just said it was her uncle who died. And I’m like, ‘Which one died? Make up your mind.’ Michael, you’ve got to fire her ass.”

Tanner shook his head, heaved a sigh. “I get the sense that life’s not easy for her. She left a good job to come here.”

Lucy snorted. “Or so she tells us.”

“We need to give her another chance.”

“We’ve given her, like, five last chances, and it doesn’t make a difference. Plus, she’s always late with the monthly. She spends most of her time on Facebook or selling stuff on eBay. Don’t we have a way of monitoring what she’s doing on a company computer?”

“If we do, that’s like Big Brother stuff. Not for me. Sorry.”

When Lucy left, Tanner opened the laptop and entered the password again, from the little pink Post-it note he’d found stuck underneath. S. Robbins. He found the Documents icon and double-clicked it, and a column of folders came up. They had names like:

Tanner glanced at his watch, saw that he had about three minutes before the cupping started. He opened the “Book Project” folder and then opened the first document he came to, labeled “Proposal 3.4.” It began:

He looked up. Senator Susan J. Robbins.

“S. Robbins” was Senator Susan Robbins. He’d heard of her. A longtime US senator from Illinois.

He had a computer belonging to a US senator.

Huh.

A knock on the jamb of his open office door.

“Boss,” Sal said. “We’re ready.”